Reply To: Dedicated JoCo Cruise Crazy Shadow Cruise website
Sorry @SapphireMind, I’ve been meaning to say that I agree with you, but it’s taken me a long time to collect my thoughts! Now that things are really moving I had better stop dithering. (:
I think it’s important to know what our goals are before we start creating a new thing (that’s what I’ve been ruminating on so long.) My personal goals for a Sea Monkey Hub are as follows:
- Make it easy for people to connect with the community, including:
- Find and make connections with individuals
- Find and create groups (for geographical location, hobby, Shadow Cruise event, whatever)
- Make it easy to find information
- A “New Monkey” section with all the usual FAQs
- Reference pages for historical information, Twit-arr instructions, anything that people might look for later
- Links to relevant Facebook groups, Flickr pools, other external sources
Current Status
Goal #1) Facebook is ok, but it only works for those who a) use Facebook and b) find the right link to the right groups. I use FB primarily for JoCo cruise stuff, and it took me until this week to find some of the Sea Monkey groups that are relevant to me! Twitter is my primary method of communication with other Sea Monkeys, but it’s not really a community-building platform. The forums provide a reasonable communication platform but it’s hard to connect forum handles to the actual people you meet.
Goal #2) We don’t currently have a good system for this at all. Facebook is abysmal for archival information, and this forum, lacking a search function, isn’t much better. Some information has been transferred to the wiki, but it’s not well structured for what we need, and most people never find the information they want.
Features I Want To See
- Customisable user profiles
- Visible only to logged-in users
- As much or as little contact information as each person is comfortable with
- Option to include a photo
- Badges for which cruises you’ve attended
- Tag cloud of interests
- Ability to “friend” or connect to other users
- Preferably also a “private” profile or block user option
- Private messages between users
- User groups
- Groups can be created by anyone
- Displays list of members
- Group forum or feed for members to chat, make plans, etc
- Easy to find, searchable list of all groups available to logged-in users
- General discussion forum
- Reference pages for all our accumulated Sea Monkey knowledge
- FAQs for new Sea Monkeys
- Cruising tips and tricks
- Glossary of inside jokes and terms
- Performer information and links to their stuff
- Summaries of prior cruise events
- Links to external sites of interest
- Compendia of video and audio recordings for each cruise
- Facebook groups
Based on @scarface’s initial overview, I’ve done a little research and believe all of my goals could be met by a social media plugin like BuddyPress, and the suggested wiki plugin.
In my opinion, yes, JCCC needs its own wiki.
I am strongly AGAINST Facebook integration, because I do not integrate my Facebook with anything. I am slightly less strongly against turning this into a full-blown social media site with activity feeds because I already have too many social media sites to keep up with! In my opinion the public forum and private message features would provide enough communication options. For this reason I prefer BuddyPress over wpSymposium, because the former allows the option to turn off the activity feed component. (Feel free to debate me on this point if you have a compelling case for all the social networking doodads.)
As @SapphireMind suggests, a Q&A plugin is also a great suggestion for helping people find the answers they’re seeking. I have a few concerns about the StackOverflow style—is it likely that the voting feature would be abused? Would people post there instead of using the forums at all? There are definite advantages to anyone being able to ask or answer a question, though I don’t feel it completely replaces the need for a FAQ elsewhere (probably the wiki.)
In case it isn’t obvious, I’m in the Want To Help camp.